Originally Posted by
Von Scharf
This thread gave me flashbacks of my favorite store - Whisky Galore in Christchurch, NZ!!!
On the way down to Antarctica, it is common to stop there and buy some really, really good stuff. So common that they know how to pack the bottles for our trip and started stocking the best American bourbons too.
Since we are limited to 85 lbs of kit when we deploy, those of us who are only going for a month end up "mule-ing" hundreds of dollars of whisky down to the ice for our friends who are there for the full season. Makes great Christmas presents. The loophole is they weigh your bags against the 85lb limit, but not you! They only weigh you to for capacity and load balance purposes. Then they make us wear our cold weather survival gear out to and while on the plane. And while that really sucks during the NZ summer, the "Big Red" coats happens to have about 20 pockets! So we load up until we can barely walk.
No tariffs or customs crap since we leave NZ and return to NZ without having entered any other country... we fly military aircraft, so baggage is just weighed and drug sniffed by cute little beagles from the NZ Defense Force.
No worries and makes for a great reunion with friends. And if you happen to know some of the glacier scientists there, they sometimes bring ancient ice from their ruined ice core samples to a get together. Last time, I put ice estimated to be 2,000 years old ice in my bourbon - it cracks explosively!
Ah, the good memories.
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